Zurich, Switzerland — (press release excerpt) — esmertec, inc. today announced the availability of FastBCC (Fast ByteCode Compiler), a break-through enhancement of esmertec's proven Jbed technology. The new Jbed Micro Edition CLDC version 3.0, enhanced with FastBCC, combines Jbed's well-known execution speed advantage with an extremely fast startup time.

Up to now, esmertec's TBCC (Target ByteCode Compiler) technology provided Jbed customers with a Java virtual machine (JVM) with unheard of performance — up to 50 times faster than competing products — but with a startup time that was noticeably slower than standard interpretive JVMs due to the native compilation. The new FastBCC technology reduces the startup time to nearly the startup time of a regular interpretive JVM without significantly sacrificing execution performance. Since the new FastBCC enhanced JVMs continue to have a memory footprint about the size of the reference product, customers can replace competitive JVMs with the new, significantly faster Jbed Micro Edition CLDC version 3.0 without drawbacks. Jbed Micro Edition CLDC version 3.0 will be released in August 2001.

Many mobile devices rely on JVMs to run applications. Most JVMs contain an interpreter for Java's portable intermedia code, the so-called bytecode. However, interpreted bytecode is processed much slower than machine code. On desktop systems it has therefore become common to use compiling JVMs. In 1998, esmertec was the first company to offer a compiling JVM on memory constrained embedded devices based on TBCC technology. Under TBCC, Java bytecode is translated into optimized machine code during load-time and then executes at the vastly superior speed that native code offers.

esmertec is offering two products based on TBCC technology: Jbed RTOS Package, a combination of JVM and real-time operating system and Jbed Micro Edition CLDC, a drop-in replacement for JVMs based on the Java 2 Micro Edition CLDC standard. Both products can run directly on the hardware or on common operating systems like Linux or Nucleus. esmertec has since sold Jbed to more than 75 customers in mobile communication, automotive and industrial automation sectors.

With the patent pending FastBCC technology, esmertec offers a new break-through for the Jbed Micro Edition CLDC product line. Under FastBCC, bytecode is still translated at load-time into optimized machine code. But unlike TBCC it is translated during the bytecode verification phase (single-pass compilation) adding only a small overhead over the mandatory verification time.

 
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